All the nouns and adjectives travel sedately in front while at the end of every sentence there’s a traffic pile-up of verbs to sort out. I usually keep my German language skills firmly locked away in the emergency room of my brain, lest the syntax disrupt the smoother highways of French and Spanish, but sometimes I have to bring them out. “Frau Ackermann, Guten Tag,” I said. She was sitting in the main square, knitting what seemed to be a sweater. “Who’s that for?” I asked. “Dr. Gabor,” she said. “I knit him one every time I’m here.” “And how many times did you say you’d been here?” “Ten. But it used to be much different.” “In what way?” “The restaurant was full of people, many Germans and Austrians came here, along with Romanians and Hungarians and even Russians. There were flowers on all the tables and a band in the evening for dancing. The government made sure there was food; there was sometimes lovely food—mushroom soup and roast pork and mutton with cream sauce, fresh rolls and cheese for breakfast, fruit and delicious pastries and cakes.
